I Thought Building a Platform Would Help Me Write

Instead, Substack taught me how easily care turns into obligation

These days, every artist gets told some version of the same thing: if you want your work to be seen, you need to build a platform.

A year and a half ago, I asked three different AIs what it would take to get my novels published, and the answer came back with fatal consistency: build a following, build a platform, learn to promote yourself.

So, in good faith, I tried.

And almost immediately I ran into the part that broke my brain.

From the very first keystroke, I knew I was being asked to learn a social choreography that had nothing to do with how I actually connect. Notes. Engagement math. The little system-gaming rituals everyone is gently encouraged to pretend are normal. The articles telling you when to post, when to repost, how often to reply, how to stay visible, how to keep your “brand” in circulation.

I couldn’t completely do what they said, but I did my version of it.

And for good and for bad, it worked.
That was part of the problem.

I’m not the kind of person who hates interaction and then blames the platform for making me do it. I actually love people. I love reading things that feel alive. I love leaving a thoughtful response when something really sings. I love encouragement. I love encouraging even more. I love the feeling that someone reached across the gap and meant it.

The problem was that, somewhere along the way, what should have felt like joy started to feel like debt.

Every time someone wrote to me with care, I felt called to answer with equal care. Every warm exchange became an obligation to sustain the warmth. And because I’m not built to do that lightly, the pleasure of connection slowly turned into the pressure of reciprocity.

It wasn’t just that I wanted to answer people. I wanted the answers to sound like me. I wanted them to carry my voice, my care, my humor—all the signs that said I actually met the person where they were. Which meant even a simple response could turn into a miniature writing assignment.

And because I chronically overthink everything, I was never quite sure what “normal” was supposed to be. A short reply could take ten or fifteen minutes. Do that a few times in a row and an hour disappears.

I don’t assume everyone else is processing social media this way, but I was. In the car. In the shower. With my wife.

And then real life keeps happening all around me.

A kid needs something. The phone rings. Dinner appears. The doctor needs blood-work. I need to schedule something. I need to reschedule something else.

Every thread snaps.

And when I come back to it, I’m no longer just finishing a reply. I’m trying to re-enter a moment that has already cooled, and I hate that feeling. I don’t know if it still fits. I don’t know if I’m too late. I don’t know if the person still wants the conversation. I only know I cared when it was alive, and now I’m standing over it trying to revive it without making it weird.

That pattern repeated often enough that eventually I started dreading the whole exchange.

Not because I didn’t want people. Because I did.

Because every interaction arrived with invisible weight attached to it. And once enough invisible weight accumulates, I stop lifting—
I freeze.

And the worst part is that it doesn’t end when I go quiet.

I keep carrying it. I still think about posts from a year and a half ago where I said something awkward, overzealous, unfinished, or just slightly wrong. I think about things I said I’d reply to and didn’t. Things I said I’d write and maybe even did, but somehow still feel unfinished in me.

I know, in most cases, nobody else cares.

I care in volumes.

My mind is always generating. Everything arrives embodied. Writing, for me, is not extraction. It’s organization, distillation, shaping, translation—and that takes time.

And real life is already full.

I have two young kids. I have a marriage, a business, friendships, appointments, all the ordinary burdens that make a real life real. The free time I do have feels precious to me. I want to spend it making things. Or being with my family. Or, honestly, sometimes just sitting outside looking at trees.

I do not want my kids seeing me on my phone all the time. Or at my desk. (They’re already drawing computer keyboards in their notebooks and making cell phones out of clay. Seriously.) I do not want to live in a posture of constant checking, constant maintenance, constant low-grade self-broadcast. It feels reductive. It feels like the opposite of the life I actually want.

Part of the problem is simply how my mind works. I have too many thoughts, too much signal, too much inner weather almost all the time. A drive home from school drop-off can hand me two essay ideas, a short story, and a line I know belongs in something. A tiny sound can turn into an image. An image can become a piece.

Writing, for me, is rarely just writing.

It’s organizing chaos into something I can actually convey to another person. That takes time. More time than the world seems willing to believe is reasonable.

I’m built a little like Walter Mitty—except the social media world doesn’t want daydreamers. It wants content managers.

And even when I do finish something, I’m still not done.

Posting is its own gauntlet. I have to reread everything. I have to make the image. I have to fuss with the image. I have to wonder if the formatting is right, if I forgot something, if I’m pushing this out to the wrong people, if I’m bothering people unnecessarily.

Even the supposedly easy part—the part where you just hit publish and move on—doesn’t feel easy to me. It feels like one more place where the machinery asks for a version of my brain I do not have.

This would all be easier to dismiss if it were just an annoyance.

It isn’t.

It has cost me the real work.

I have 160,000 words of a novel trilogy that I haven’t seriously worked on it in over a year. By the way, I made a movie a while back—I did the pre-production, the production, the post-production, all the “hard” parts—and then hit the part where I was supposed to promote it and felt like I’d been handed an entirely different profession. I have notebooks full of thought pieces, scraps, fragments, reviews, diary entries, openings, images, things I actually want to write.

The problem is that the machinery around “sharing” and “building a presence” keeps eating the exact energy I need to finish the deeper work.

So this is me trying to let go of something that has been hurting me: the idea that I have to keep up in order to be loving, or responsive in order to be sincere, or visibly engaged in order to prove that I care.

I care more than my visible behavior will ever fully show.

If I’ve interacted here and I’ve gone quiet, or read slowly, or failed to reply, or failed to keep up with your work, I’m sorry for the distance but not for the truth behind it. The care was real. The care is real. I just can’t keep turning that care into an endless system of visible returns.

And I need to let go of the scoreboard too. Follower count, likes, circulation, all the little proxy gods of the platform age. I understand that some people are better at it, lighter with it, more strategic with it.

I am not.

I can’t write toward the math without feeling myself leave the room. So I release everybody from that too. I release you from having to prove your care in numbers, and I release myself from having to chase them.

I may still show up in bursts. I may still get joyful and overdo it. I may still disappear for a while because life is full and my mind is slower than the internet wants it to be.

But I need to stop confusing love with output.

I only know one thing for sure: when I’m truly with you, I care.

With love. And fire.

🤍🔥 [ 2D ]

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